IT Superheroes Get Their Day

Reviving a crashed server until the wee hours of the morning! Encrypting CDs! Fending off spammers, hackers and other villains with a single patch!

Though the work of IT professionals may seem no match in excitement or power of comic superheroes, Microsoft and Seagate thinks it should be. Together, they have sponsored a daily Web coming called Heroes Happen Here featuring techies as crime fighters and IT lifesavers.

Jordan Gorfinkel, a former DC Comics editor known for reviving the Batman series, has created the comics, whose storyline focuses on four characters who are unexpectedly thrown together to chase down a rogue computer virus to restore power to Lord Firewall.

The comic debuted last week and will run through June 28.

Of course, because everything with Microsoft (it seems) must be a little complicated, to view the comic one must first download Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash-killing technology. In addition, if the name sounds familiar is it because the company is also using the Heroes Happen Here moniker for this month's launch of the 2008 SQL Servier, Windows Server and Visual Studio.